Jack Penny : The Hand That Feeds You

The Hand That Feeds You

JUNE 13-18

The Dot Project is delighted to present The Hand That Feeds You, an exhibition of a new body of work by British artist Jack Penny.

The artist draws upon the crumpled majesty of the handsome old house in a series of bold and arresting paintings that emanate from the residual fumes of imagined parties gone by within its once grand, now care-worn walls. 

Penny’s work is born of the friction between order and chaos – the need for organisation and desire for escape that all human beings experience to a greater or lesser degree. His paintings depict people engaged in routine and ritual — whether at work, at play, in harmony, or in dispute — capturing moments of joy and release, alongside stress, anxiety, and clamor.

Taking inspiration from the biting satire of Ralph Steadman and Robert Colescott, Ray Materson’s intuitive rawness and the emotional intensity of Alice Neel, his paintings are uncanny and unsparing in equal measure.  Taken as a whole they show Penny’s keen eye for the basic absurdity of human performance in social settings is as prominent as ever. In his free and empathetic hand, immediately recognisable images of drinkers, diners and those who facilitate the merrymaking take on a feverish, accident-prone physicality.

The closer the artist gets, the subjects tend to grow to appear as if bursting at the seams of the two-dimensional role asked of them by formal convention. They may be comedic, tragic, saintly or sinister – sometimes all at once. A generous host, Penny indulges all the conflicting whims of his gatecrashing subjects in a collection of images that are gloriously contradictory.

Uninterested in presenting an easily decipherable reading of the intentions or worthiness of his impish characters, Penny points and prods with a singularly sense of mischief, sooner or later getting all of us with a lithe and vigorous mixture of humour and discomfort that leaves even the numbest of limbs tickled.

It is in this spirit of the search for resilient and imperfect beauty that they feel very much at home against the raw, enduring patina of 14 Cavendish, W1.

14 CAVENDISH W1

LONDON